Today is Thursday, July 3, the 184th day of 2014. There are 181 days left in the year.

HIGHLIGHTS

2000 – Opposition candidate Vicente Fox is declared the winner in Mexico’s presidential elections in a stunning victory that ends the ruling PRI party’s 71-year lock on the presidency.

OTHER EVENTS

Highlights in history on this date:

321 – Roman emperor Constantine, a Christian, proclaims Sunday a day of rest and religious observance.

1583 – Russia’s Czar Ivan the Terrible kills his son Ivan in a fit of rage.

1608 – Samuel de Champlain, French explorer, lays foundation of Canadian city of Quebec.

1778 – Prussia declares war on Austria, starting War of Bavarian Succession.

1863 – Confederates are forced to retreat on the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg, turning the fortunes in the American Civil War; 37,000 die on both sides in three days of battle.

1944 – Soviet forces retake Minsk from Germans, capturing 100,000 troops.

1950 – US and North Korean troops clash for first time in Korean War.

1954 – Food rationing, imposed during World War II, ends in Britain.

1962 – Algeria becomes independent after 132 years of French rule.

1971 – Indonesians vote in their country’s first national election in 16 years.

1988 – The USS Vincennes shoots down an Iran Air jetliner over the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 people aboard. The crew misidentified the plane as an Iranian F-14 fighter.

1991 – Yugoslav military commanders dispatch troops and tanks toward breakaway republics of Croatia and Slovenia but order troops to hold their fire unless attacked.

1993 – Ousted Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide signs an accord in New York with the Haitian military that will return him to office.

1996 – Boris Yeltsin decisively defeats communist challenger Gennady Zyuganov for a second term as Russian president.

1998 – Colombia’s second-largest guerrilla group, the ELN, releases 15 young women held hostage for two weeks, whom the rebels had accused of being army spies disguised as good Samaritans.

1999 – In their first matchup in three years, world chess champion Garry Kasparov bests his key rival, Anatoly Karpov, to win the Siemens Giants chess tournament.

2005 – Saudi anti-terror forces kill al-Qaida’s top leader in the kingdom in a dawn gun battle. But despite the Moroccan terrorist Younis Mohammed Ibrahim al-Hayari’s death, the number of extremists has grown despite a two-year crackdown on militants.

2007 – A 10-year-old Nepalese girl is stripped of her title as a living goddess because she travelled overseas to promote a documentary about the centuries-old tradition. Because of popular support, Sajani Shakya’s position is reinstated, but she retires in March 2008 at the age of 11.

2009 – After bitter wrangling, Africa’s leaders agree to denounce the International Criminal Court and refuse to extradite Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir, who has been indicted for crimes against humanity in Darfur.

2011 – At least 10 people are killed in weekend violence in Nigeria’s restive northeast.

2012 – Barclays Chief Executive Bob Diamond resigns, the biggest scalp in a financial market scandal that has ripped through the bank’s senior management and sown the seeds for a new investigation into Britain’s banking sector.

Today’s Birthdays:

John Clare, English poet (1793-1864); Franz Kafka, Austrian author (1883-1924); Tom Stoppard, British playwright (1937–); Jean-Claude Duvalier, former president of Haiti (1951–); Ken Russell, British film director (1927-2011); Tom Cruise, US actor (1962–).

Thought For Today:

To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer – Paul Ehrlich, American scientist.